Daniel Senie wrote:
<big SNIP>
Ad-hoc networks are another similar case, where two machines
are connected via ad-hoc wireless, bluetooth, firewire,
or similar. I'd think it might be useful to be able to
serve web pages between two laptops on a train without
requiring a naming service to be present. Perhaps that won't
be an issue in the brave new world.
Your naming service will probably be of the broadcast kind
In any other way do you like remembering and typing over 128bit
addresses?? :)
Most OS's require a (unique) hostname to be entered/automatically
generated on install to identify the host to the rest of the
system/network/users. This note can also be used to identify
it over your file sharing protocol. SMB/CIFS comes with it's
own version for example. Most Gnutella/* I don't know what
filesharing protocols also have a naming system based on
the users login name etc. Heck even your bluetooth cellphone
nicely announces it's name + address around the room when
you accidentally forget to turn it off. Last weekend some
unnamed person was even spamming all the people at the
national ISP Karting competition over bluetooth. Good guess
to try and spam there as most ISP people are fond of geek
tools but also forget to turn their toys off/protect them :)
It just seems to me there is some utility in having this
capability (and others must have thought so since we have
an RFC describing the formatting). Let's think hard before
deciding we are sure there are no useful cases left.
Ofcourse there is a need for this, but like SL there are some
ways of solving the current ways of doing it. Better clean
up now than be sorry in the end. Eg alcatel adsl modems have a
web&telnet-interface for configuring them, then again being
a SOHO product it should be capable of autoconfiguration.
One thing that's for sure is that you can't use two of those
devices in the same network as the IP's will always be 10.0.0.138
with no other way to change it than by serial or the network.
As we did invent DAD there is no such 'defacto' IP for those
boxes to configure themselves with any more...
We could use ping6 ff02::1%eth0, but tell that to a homeuser...
Greets,
Jeroen